Guidance Counselor 2.0: Use Claude to Figure Out What Job You Actually Want

Alrighty, good morning, good morning. What's going on, everybody? Happy Tuesday. We are back and we are back with a vengeance. Excited for this, it's going to be good. I am pumped. Let me alert the troops. It is going to be fantastic. Good morning, good morning. Please say hey, would love to hear from you. Start a little bit early. Good morning. Today's gonna be a good one. It's gonna be a little different. It's gonna be a little different. Uh, I'm nervous. This is probably the closest I've ever gotten to like live coding. I've never done this before. Um, so we are going to, um, we're gonna get into it here in a minute. But if you are tuning in, say hey. Would love to hear from you. Let me know where you're tuning in from. But your boy's back. We're gonna start going live once a week. Make sure to use your work's Claude account too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Good news is we're on Gemini at work, but I'm using Claude here. So, but anyways, it's good to see you, Emmett. Good to see you. Please say hey. We'd love to hear from you. Started a little bit early this morning. Hope everyone's doing well. It is so humid here in Nashville that our are, uh, sorry, I'm getting Slack messages, uh, that our ceiling is sweating. It is so humid in Nashville that the ceiling is sweating, so that's cool. Um, uh, what's going on? Hello from Raleigh. Raleigh, we got some plans, we got some plans. The Ronstadt Digital Talk community is going to be out there Very, very soon. Keep an eye out, but it's gonna be a good little time, a lot of good stuff heading your way. So, all right, all that being said, let's go ahead and dive in. So again, good morning, y'all. Welcome to Guidance Counselor 2.0. If you are tuning in for the first time, I've been doing this livestream for 6 years now, and over the course of the 6 years, it's changed, right? I started this livestream just talking, yapping, how to find a job 6 years ago, and it's kind of progressed over the last few years, bringing people on, highlighting their job search, how they found jobs. And while that is still absolutely a focus of mine, over the last little bit, I've just been insanely busy, to be totally frank. And so I haven't done as many live streams. We've been executing within the community team at a very high clip. And so I've taken a little time off from doing these streams, but I've thought about it. And again, the whole point of these streams is to add value. I wanna add value to you, to your job search, to your lives, whatever you say. Also, I realize my shirt's dirty from my kids. So disregard that. So I did some thinking and I've done a lot of talking with people and the conversations keep going back to, hey, have you used AI? Like, have you plugged in basic information to AI to help you? And a lot of people are like, no, I haven't thought about that. So I've had enough of these conversations to the point where I'm just like, you know what? I'm just gonna go live. We're gonna break this down. We're gonna share this. We're gonna share my screen and we're gonna get into it. We're gonna work through this together. I'm a little nervous partially because I'm really bad at kind of following a certain program. And so guess what? I use Claude to write this program to make sure I stay on task. Of course, knowing me, I probably will go outside of the program, but this is an 8-week series. So I'm doing these once a week every Tuesday. for the next 8 weeks. And my whole goal is just to unpack how to use Claude or AI or whatever. I'm gonna use Claude, but again, I think this could be pretty applicable to whatever tool you wanna use. And so yeah, that's what I'm gonna do. So again, it's good to see y'all this morning. Yes. Hey from Atlanta. We had to buy a humidifier for the living room. Yeah, I think we're gonna have to buy a humidifier because it is nuts. I've never seen my ceiling sweat before. That was— Absolutely crazy. So all right, let's go ahead. Let's go ahead and get into it. Oh, real real real quick. Just some shoutouts here. Again, if you want to check out what we do, kind of who we are, check out torque.dev/community. Would love to have you check check it out. Join the platform. Again, quick overview about the Torque platform. Torque platform basically allows you to get into the ecosystem of the Ronset digital job opportunities. Wrong Side Digital gets hundreds of jobs a week in the US. And so that's why I tell people, like, hop in, sign in, and definitely join the community. You'll get updated once you sign up with all of our community stuff. Also too, listen, if you wanna know when I go live with these type of programs, text me. This is my number. Text LIVE 615-235-5650. It's actually me. If you have not jumped into the Discord, our Discord is hopping. Jeff Jesse is kind of our, uh, one of our, one of our unofficial community managers, to be totally honest with you. Um, so definitely hop in. It's a great little time. Um, yeah. All right, cool. So I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen. Um, it's great to see y'all this morning. It's great to see y'all. All right, so again, this is my first time doing this, so this is going to be interesting. Um, so let's Go into let's see here window. Let's do this. All right, coffee and Claude time. I love it. I love it. All right, so we're gonna dive in today, and again, I have my prompt up here. And today, what we're gonna do is use Claude to figure out the job you actually want. Now, for me, we're gonna go through this exercise from my lens, right? I think this is gonna be the easiest thing. So again, for my managers or people watching this, I'm not looking for a job, but but we're gonna go through. the exercise as if I was looking for a job to kind of walk through how we would do this and how you would do this. So first off, let's start up and let's talk about, explain what you're doing and why Claude is different from Googling career advice, right? So I think one of the things that's crazy here is I've used it a ton for my work and trying to, I've used AI a ton for my work and really trying to find the blind spots for me. But let's just say I don't know what I wanna do next, right? And really my job too is kind of all over the place, right? So I'm gonna plug this in, be like, hey Claude, I am looking for a new job and I need your help on what I should look for next. Can you Ask me some questions. All right, so again, very, very simple here, right? Very simple. Um, uh, now what I will do— so, um, let's see here. Want more scope, bigger title, comp isn't where it should be, unhappy at Torque, want out, uh, exploring, just see what's out there. So, so let's just see. Let's, let's, let's just say I, I, I am— let's just say I'm exploring to see what's out there. What kind of role are you looking for? Similar community marketing leadership, step up CMO, something founder, not sure yet. Let's just say not sure yet, open to ideas. How time sensitive is this? Let's just say casually looking within the next few months. So let's go through this. Now, I am not gonna go into how to set up Claude. I am not a Claude expert. I have messed around with it. I do, I think there are ways for you to set all this up. Again, I'm not an expert at that. I would highly recommend to go check out on how to set up your Claude, your skill files. I'm not getting into that. All I'm focusing on is just prompting and walking through this stuff. Okay, got it. Low pressure mode. A few things for introduction. What's actually working in your current role and you'd want to keep finding? So the parts of job that you'd be sad to lose versus what's missing and making you look at all. So let's just say this. Let's say things I enjoy, right? So I really enjoy helping manage and lead content and branding, right? Something I love doing. Love building in public. Let's, you know, love managing our email marketing, which is one of the things I do. Love leading a team of people. Big people manager guy. Let's dive into, see what else. Love building in public, which is kind of what we talked about. Love speaking and again, brand awareness. Love Love helping people in their careers. Okay, so that's so so so that's good. All right, things things I don't enjoy, right? There's there's honestly not a lot of things I I don't enjoy, but let's just say um let's let's let's just say um uh travel is a lot um which is not again I have to preface everything. I'm just going through the exercise here. Um I would say um uh you know. Maybe looking to go back into a smaller company, even though I love the perks of a big company. Things I don't enjoy, let's just say, would love a bigger budget. All right, so let's just do that, right? Love this approach. Thank you so much. So again, we're kind of walking through this here and I'm gonna go check my script, make sure I'm not going super off base here. All right. So we are heading down the right path here. All right. So this is a clear pattern you're describing. I want a different job. You're describing, I want MAPS type of head of marketing, VP, chief brand officer to earlier stage companies, Series B-ish, where you're doing brand content and a team with your personal platform. A few things stand out. Building in public showed up twice unprompted. That's your strongest differentiator. Smaller company plus bigger budget is the real tension to solve for smaller companies, meaning smaller budgets, not bigger ones. So the move is in a smaller company. It's early stage but well-funded or small team. So again, it gives you some really, really good insight here. So what title are you optimizing for, right? So let's do VP or head of community. And head of marketing. But I need, let's see here. Yeah, I think that's good here. VP, head of marketing. So again, we're kind of walking through this thing and we're prompting it, right? I think one of the things that most people just don't understand is like AI is really like your guidance counselor, right? Anything that you're Maybe misunderstanding, or you're or or there gaps, or you need explanation on. All right, so good. That's a workable range. Last piece: What's a team budget that you bigger to you? Let's just say. Let's just say. Let's just say. I'm just throwing out a number here. Let's just say two million budget. So let's do this here. All right. So it says once I have this put together, heavy lifting, eight percent of your heart. And so, and I think one of the things that's. really cool here is, so want me to build that positioning doc? Yeah, I'd be curious on a positioning doc. So again, we're kind of walking through this thing here, right? And again, if you have any questions or anything, again, this is like trying to figure out the job you actually want, right? And I'm trying to not skip ahead because next week is Build Your Target Company Hit List with Claude. So I really wanna make sure I stay on 'cause there's a lot of things that are popping in my brain and I wanna stay really consistent. All right, let's see. It's building the doc for me right now. I don't code, but I feel like this is the closest thing to coding in public, which is really interesting to me. Also, if you told me 6 years ago I'd be using AI on a livestream, I would've absolutely laughed at you. All right, so it's building the positioning doc. Let's see. What it does here, let's see what it does. All right, Taylor Dessin. What I bring: community that drives business. Built and led community function at Torque, scaling towards a goal of 2 million tech professionals in the community. Built a community metric framework. So what it does now, I do have to say, I think one of the things that I do want to emphasize here, I think I do wanna go into customize here. And I wanna go into, is it skills? No, it's not skills. Does anybody know the one where it's like a summary about you? Let's see here, settings. There's general instructions for Claude, accounts. There's one of these where like you can update like your about. Because what's happening right now is it's pulling from my history. So one of the things that I would do, so let's backtrack a little bit and let's do this. Let's go to, assume you know nothing about me. I know you do. What would you want to know and how to build out a background about me for my job search. All right, like we should have gone back a little bit more. And so again, Claude, one of the cool things about AI is that it has a saved memory about you, right? So a lot of the stuff it's pulling from all of the data I put into Claude for my work. So I wanna start from zero, right? So again, roles, titles, companies, dates, the resume skeleton. What you actually did day to day, not just the job title, skills, expertise. So again, like what I would do, like before you start your job search, I think this is great information. The reason why I think this is great information is because so many people start the job search and they don't even have an idea of why they're looking or their background. And what Claude can do, or AI in general can do, is you can answer all these questions. And go through it, right? So skills expertise, what technical skills are you good at? All right, target direction, differentiators, constraints, story, right? So this is really, really good information. I'm not gonna go through this with you right now because all this is saved. But again, if you're starting from scratch and you have not used AI for your job search, I would absolutely get AI to know who you are. It's incredibly, incredibly important. All right, so let's go back to the script. I gotta stay on script. So one of the things is this prompt. I like this, values and priorities, right? So it says, I really like this. Let's go and plug this in here. Says, I want to figure out what I actually want in my next role, not just what I'm qualified for. Ask me 5 to 7 questions that make clear on my values, priorities, and non-negotiables. Question one: When you think back to the best stretch of your work career, the time you felt most alive, what were you doing day by day? For me, I think it's building from zero. Like that's one thing I'm passionate about. You know, so so so for example, at Vaco, I built a talent platform off of Trello and scaled a team from zero to seven people. Um, and grew that, uh, team to $2 million in revenue, uh, in the first year. You know, when I was at Gun.io, um, uh, they were small and helped scale their community from zero. And then with Torque, Ronstadt Digital, um, uh, hired as head of community Where there was no one in place before and built that myself. All right. So again, right, we're asking this is when you go back to stretch your work and we're asking this for people to tune in. I wanna figure out what I actually want in my next role. Ask me 5 to 7 questions. Question 2, on the flip side, think about a stretch where you felt drained or stuck. You know, for me, not having the autonomy to work and execute with my ideas, right? Another great one, right? Again, the emphasis I wanna— I would literally spend time. Do you have to use Claude? No, you do not have to use Claude. You could use any of these. The big things that I want you to get across today is the prompts I'm using to go through any AI tool you use, right? And again, we're gonna put this in a blog format and share it out within the community team. But the big thing is prompts, right? So again, to recap, David, so I think to start, again, Claude has all my information, but if you were to start from zero, here's what I'd want to know. So I ask, assume you know nothing about me, what would you wanna know and how to build out my background for my job search? That's where I would start. First and foremost. Then what we've done so far is, hey Claude, I'm looking for my next job. I need your help on what I should look for my next job. Can you ask me some questions? Then we went into this. Then the next prompt I use is right here. I wanna figure out what I actually want my next role, not just what I'm qualified for. And now it's asked me. So again, I'm not concerned about the tool. We use Gemini internally. I use Claude kind of on my own, but again, I'm focused on the prompts, not the tool, right? Question 3, when you picture reporting to someone, what does that look like? I typically work best the closest to the founder/CEO, right? A lot of my roles have had high visibility Next to the founder, next to the CEO, right? Question 4, let's talk money and risk. Think about comp structure, right? Let's just say, let's just throw out a number here. Let's just say I'm looking at, you know, let's just say $150K. How do you feel about a mix? Not really interested in equity, really focused on the take-home. Monthly, right? So again, now that may be different for you. You know, I have 3 kids. I'm specifically looking for monthly take-home more than everything else, right? Question 5, think about team size structure. Do you want to be hands-on building, managing small team like 0 to 7 build, or are you past that? Uh, I mean, I think for me I'd be open to both, um, but if it's a larger team where I can't necessarily build as much as I want, be able to hire my own people and not inherit a team. You can use what you're familiar with, find easier to use, I think. Yeah. All right, question 6, what does a smaller company actually mean? I've worked at companies with hundreds of people and companies of 30 people. So open, right? Again, we're walking through this thing. Again, one of the things you have to realize is AI is your guidance counselor, right? I mean, this is really good information. I use AI all the time for work to prompt me and try to make me think differently, right? Last one. What would you say no immediately? I would say, Lower than my salary target and, um, you know, not the ability to build on— to build, to build something. All right, so again, right, we're— so we're going through here, right? So it's building all this out for you to really get a good idea, right? All right, so let's go So this is interesting. Want to turn this into a second positioning doc, basically a personal hiring rubric you can hold up against any opportunity that comes your way. Something like a one-page what I'm screening for doc. So let's do this. Yes, let's do this. So I actually want, so I'm gonna go find on the internet and what we're gonna do is I'm gonna show you how to cross-reference this stuff, right? So we're building out a personal rubric To grade this stuff, to grade jobs that come my way. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go find a random job somewhere. Let's just say head of community job descriptions. All right. Da da da. Wait, hold on. Let me see here. I need see here VP of community. Job description, VP of community roles. All right, all right. So they built the so so they built the the the the doc here, right? So I'm gonna go on Google real fast and just find find a I'm finding a VP. All right, so this is obviously not my wheelhouse whatsoever, but. I want, I want to— all right, so I found a job. I'm gonna see, can you see this job and screen against my personal rubric? I found a job. I don't know, I don't know if it can scan this or not. We'll see. Why is that glitching? That's annoying me. All right, so I found a VP of Workforce Development role. So, so, so here's the deal, right? Again, we're doing this live here. I posted, I posted a job in here against the personal rubric that we just came up with going through the steps based on my values and what I'm looking for next. And now it's reading this to see if it's a fit. All right, comp passes the range, right? Even though the low end of the range, um, immediately knows this is where it gets shaky. The job asks for a master's degree, which you don't have. Thanks, Claude. And the role is built around grant funding, accreditation, academic pathway alignment, higher ed compliance, not the kind of zero-to-one brand community building you're doing. Also explicitly a community college operations role, workforce, adult education, not the audience. The autonomy proximity is mixed. You report to the president, which checks the proximity box, but it isn't a builder from nothing, right? So again, honest, this one pass. The title rhymes with what you want, but the actual work does not match, right? So again, I think this is a great thing, throwing it, throwing in job descriptions to see if you're a fit, see where the weaknesses are, right? Before prompting, do we set or train the agent as a job counselor? That's what I would do, right? So what I would do is I would create— so here's where we get into projects, right? I know Google Gemini calls them gems, but what I would do is, and I know ChatGPT has projects, what I would do for your job search, depending on how you use Claude, is I would go into projects and I would do new projects And I would do job search, guide me on my job search and a place to hold all information, right? So if you did not know about Projects, so Projects keeps everything in one spot, right? And so for me, what you do is you can upload your resume and everything is contextual to this information. So what I would do here is, and we probably should have started working out of a project, But what I would say is, hey, hey Claude, I'm looking to find my next job. I need you to act as a job, uh, hunt counselor, um, counselor and/or recruiter. Okay. And then, and then it's going to go ahead and prompt you in here, right? So that's what I would do, Amelia. Um, I would, I would, I would open up a project so you can keep everything, right? Um, and then it'll basically go through things. So realistically, I probably should have started this as a project for the exercise. Um, I'm actually gonna probably work out of this project just in general, just as we kind of move along here. So, uh, so, so let's just do that. All right, so That answers Amelia's question. Stephanie, it's good to see you, girl. It's good to see you. Glad you're here. All right, so let's go to the next prompt here. So we've gone skills audit, right? So we've gone through skills audit. Here's my background. You tell them of your background, your values and priorities. Let's talk about define the target role, right? Now, I didn't do this in the project, so I'm gonna go back. I'm gonna go back to this one. All right, define the target role based off everything we talked through. Write me a one-page target role profile. There you go, right? So one of the, one of the ways this could help you from this prompt is a lot of people have a hard time framing What they want, right? So this is great. I'm looking for a VP head of community or head of marketing role at a company small enough that I have real ownership and visibility with the founder CEO, but fun enough to pay X amount of cash with a real budget behind community brand, somewhere between 30 to a few hundred person range, industry agnostic where the function is being built, right? This is really good information. Now, I'm not saying you have to memorize this word for word, but I think this is great clarity to get your brain and mind headed in the right direction when it comes to this stuff. All right, so then the next thing. All right, we already did, I'm following this here. All right, so job, job, all right, so let's do this, JD fit check, right? So I'm gonna plug in another job description that I'm gonna find and I'm actually gonna go to LinkedIn and try to find an actual job that's like closer because I want to show, I wanna show something that's more of a closer fit. Let's see here, VP of community. Let's see here, jobs. All right, let's do this one, simple practice. I'm gonna, let's see here, how can I save this? I wonder if I can copy link. Okay. All right, I found a job. It's a VP of President and Community and Brand for a company, very kind of similar to what I do. And I'm gonna do the last prompt, which is a JD fit check. All right, based off the job description, based off my target role profile, does this role fit? Looks like actually paste in. Okay, all right, so LinkedIn blocks it, so we're gonna have to just copy and paste it here. All right, hold on real quick, I gotta Let's see here. Go to company site. All right. I'm gonna do this and do this, do this. All right, there we go. All right, so I just went to the company site and I just pasted the job description in here. And again, the prompt we use is, is based on my target role profile, does this role fit what I'm looking for? Score it 1 to 10. And tell me why. Flag anything that's a yellow flag. Score 4 to 10. Not great. Comp is well above your floor. Red flags: reports to the CMO, not the founder. This is an inherited team, not a build. The clinical mental health credit credential requirement is a real mismatch. Yellow flags: hiring control is unclear. Bottom line: strong comp and right function, but it falls— but it fails your 2 most personal non-negotiables: proximity to the top And the ability to build rather than inherit. All right, cool. The last thing that I wanna do before I wrap up here, and again, we're gonna keep these 30 minutes. Let me know if you have any questions. Hopefully you've enjoyed this first week. One of the things, and I don't know if it's gonna get into this, but this is like the one thing that people, I keep talking to people and I'm like, have you used AI to ask what job boards to look into? Right? So I'm gonna say, okay, so next question. And I'm going off the script here. Of course I'm going off script. Okay, so next question. What type of job boards or niche communities should I look at being involved or checking out based on my background? Right. I think a lot of people in the job search don't know where to start. And I think this is a great way to start. Be like, hey, I'm a Salesforce developer. I'm looking for communities to get involved. I'm looking for Salesforce job boards. Where should I go? Based off your profile, 0 to 1, here we go. WellFound, got that. MKT One, never heard of that. It's a curated job board and newsletter community by 2 former marketing executives. I've never heard of that. That's great. Exit5, never heard of this. Is the strongest niche fit most B2B SaaS. It's focused on community for marketers. That's great. AMA Job Board, never heard of that one. It's a solid secondary channel, less of a search volume, more of a positioning. Marketing hire and growth hacker jobs. Round things out as searchable boards rather than community plays. Beyond boards, here's the part that actually matters more, some of your profile. And again, it goes into here. So again, most people don't know where to start. Most people don't know what job boards to start at. Most people don't know where to apply or get involved when. This is a great way to go about doing it. All right, so to recap, so to recap, Right. Again, don't be caught up in the tool. Be caught up in the prompts. Right. If you are starting your job search, I would ask one, do a skills audit. Here's my background. Post your resume or do a quick summary. I want you to act as a career coach based on what I've shared. Tell me, what are my strongest transferable skills? Types of roles do I see naturally suited for? What industries value this background? Be honest. No flattering. Give me the real read. That's incredibly important. From a prompt perspective, prompt two values and priorities. I want to figure out what I actually want my next role, not just what I'm qualified for. Ask me five to seven questions that will help me get clear on my values, priorities, and non-negotiables. Ask them one at a time and wait for my answer before moving to the next one. Prompt three define the target role based off everything we've talked about. Write me a one paragraph target role profile. This type of the type of role, company size, industry, and environment that. fits what I'm looking for. Make it specific enough that I could use it and evaluate job postings. And then prompt 4, JD fit check. Here's a job description based off my profile. Does this role fit with what I'm looking for? Score it 1 to 10. Flag anything that's a yellow flag. That is the prompts. And finally, I added one more based off, based off all the prompts that we have done. Where should I start my job search? What job boards should I look at? What communities should I be involved with? And then it went in and shared this here. So that concludes week 1. Week 2, we're gonna go build into your target company hit list. So I have some prompts we're gonna walk through there. Week 3 is a live resume rewrite. That's gonna be a fun one. Take a real resume and rebuild it. And then week 4, we're gonna do live LinkedIn makeovers. Week 5, we're gonna do write cold DMs and cover letters live and actually send them. And then week 6, we're gonna do Claude interviews you live, mock interview on a stream. And then we're going to go into building your personal Claude job search system, turn everything from weeks 1 to 7 in a repeatable workflow, prompts, etc. In hindsight, I probably need to do all this in a project. So it can save all this stuff. So very helpful. Gonna try this. Yeah, yeah, we're gonna get into more too. This can definitely be a Claude skill, 100%. We'll go into skills too. I didn't wanna get into the nuts and bolts of Claude. Maybe we do that next week. Maybe we make this a 9-week series, TBD. But again, we can go over skills. All right, thanks for tuning in, y'all. Appreciate it. If this meant something to you and you feel like your network could benefit from this, please share it. It would mean a lot to me. We are going to create one-pagers within the Torque Ronstadt community so you can use this stuff moving forward. But again, thanks for tuning in today. Hopefully you enjoy this. It's a little bit different. Let me know if you liked it. Shoot me a DM. If you hated it, let me know how I can improve. I'm always looking to improve. Again, this is very different for me. And again, y'all have a great Tuesday and we'll see y'all next week for week 2. Have a good one. Peace.